The mayor of Barcelona Jaume Collboni has said he is relieved that the Israel-Premier Tech squad will not be lining up for the 2026 Tour de France Grand Départ in the Catalan capital with its current name.
After San Sebastian in 1992 and Bilbao in 2023, Barcelona is set to become the third city on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees to play host to the Tour start, next Saturday, July 4. A total of three stages will take place in Catalunya.
Whilst they also insisted that the race start would go ahead in Catalunya, their demand also mirrored protests in the 2025 Vuelta a España about the team’s presence in the race, which led to the cancellation of the Vuelta’s final stage.
Last year during the Tour de France, there were some sporadic protests about Israel-Premier Tech’s presence and at the finish line in Toulouse on stage 11, a demonstrator was manhandled to the ground by a Tour official after he ran onto the course just as the race was approaching. However, there was nothing on the scale or intensity of the Vuelta a España pro-Palestine protests in September.
In a separate interview with Dernière Heure, Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme said on Thursday that he believed that the “international situation” – a reference to the ceasefire recently declared in Gaza – “had moved in the right direction compared with how it was some weeks ago.”
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